Hi guys,

A small pet project of mine that I am working on is writing a set of scripts that duplicates certain keyboard input from one computer to another. I got the server and client set up and running, and I can enter input from the server and have the client receive it.

The catch is that I want it to be able to both send and receive input while the windows aren't in focus. Through searching on this site, I found that someone recommended Win32::GuiTest for sending keyboard events without focus, and that is working great, but I haven't found anything for receiving keyboard events without focus.

Just incase anyone is curious, I'm writing this for use of running two characters in WoW - I want the "1" key to trigger on both computers when I press it on one. I'm fully aware that reading input while the program isn't in focus is exactly what is necessary to write a keylogger, but there are plenty of other legitimate uses for such functionality (global hotkeys being the first example to come to mind), so I expected something like this to be available, but I haven't come across it yet. Is there some package that does this?

Here is my current code... (not that it isn't functioning as I currently intend - I'm just missing a better alternative to ReadKey)

server:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use IO::Socket;
use Term::ReadKey;

ReadMode 1;
my ($PORT, $server, $client);
$PORT = 9000; # pick something not in use
$server = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Proto     => 'tcp',
    LocalPort => $PORT,
    Listen    => SOMAXCONN,
    Reuse     => 1
);
die "can't setup server" unless $server;
print "[Server accepting clients]\n";
while ($client = $server->accept()) {
    $client->autoflush(1);
    print "Received connection!\n";
    while (1)
    {
        my ($key);
        while (not defined ($key)) {
            $key = ReadKey(-1);
        }
        print "Get key $key\n";
        print $client "$key\n";
        $key = ReadKey(-1); #clear $key
    }
}
close $client;

ReadMode 0;
[download]

client:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use IO::Socket;
use Win32::GuiTest qw(:ALL);

my $host = shift || 'localhost'; 
my $port = shift || '9000'; 
my ($kidpid, $socket, $line);
# create a tcp connection to the specified host and port
$socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Proto     => 'tcp',
    PeerAddr  => $host,
    PeerPort  => $port
    )
or die "can't connect to port $port on $host: $!";

print "[Connected to $host:$port]\n";

while (1)
{
        while (defined ($line = <$socket>)) {
            sleep(1);
            chomp($line);
            SendKeys($line);
            print "$line\n";
        }
}
[download]

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